NXTcomm: TIA think green thoughts with EIATRACK

The Telecommunications Industry Association (TIA), which along with USTelecom is co-hosting NXTcomm this week in Las Vegas, is like a growing number of its constituents joining the green movement. TIA president Grant Seiffert this week said the agency is "aggressively investing" in external and internal green initiatives. The external moves include EIATRACK, a global environmental intelligence and regulatory tracking service for product-oriented electronics companies that keeps them informed about environmental standards and mandates in more than 110 jurisdictions worldwide. EIATRACK has more than 150 companies subscribing, at least half of them TIA members and the rest companies from other sectors.

"From a cost standpoint, vendors need to know what the rules of the road are in various parts of the world where compliance is concerned," Seiffert told FierceTelecom this week. As telecom companies increasingly factor power consumption and carbon footprints into their deployment decisions, the rest of the industry needs to respond, he said. The TIA also has launched an E-cycling Central website, with database information on more than 2,000 electronics recycling locations in the U.S. Seiffert also said the TIA is internally "taking inventory of how green we are and how green our standards programs are, and what we can do better."

Elsewhere at NXTcomm this week, we've seen a Green Village on the exhibit floor, green-themed conference panels, and Alcatel-Lucent talked about a smart metering application, the type of application that many telecom companies are likely to support in the months and years ahead

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